Yesterday, after finishing the article on Robinhood, I browsed related information online. I found that my statement in the article about the OpenAI equity trading being somewhat unnoticed greatly underestimated the industry's reaction.

Moreover, the trading involved not only OpenAI's equity but also SpaceX's equity.

In fact, many heavyweight investors in the crypto ecosystem have noticed this transaction and realized the enormous imaginative potential behind it.

This inevitably reminded me of the ICO boom back in the day.

I have always believed that ICOs are undeniably a great application that emerged after Bitcoin since the birth of crypto technology.

Ethereum was funded through an ICO.

Its greatness lies in the fact that it pushed the boundaries of investors to the extreme, eliminating the artificially set and inherently added thresholds in investment for the first time in human history, allowing people from any corner of the world reachable by the internet to participate in investments regardless of race, gender, nationality, or belief.

It achieved the maximum liberalization of investment and, for the first time, allowed people to have participation and choice rights without permission.

This extreme liberalization of investment inevitably brings about an extreme wealth effect.

Of course, it also brought a significant negative effect: the vast majority of projects ultimately turned into a mess.

I believe the main reason for this negative effect is:

At that time, there was a lack of a relatively mature project evaluation system, and the vast majority of investors had no data for reference or learning.

However, such a system is quite mature in traditional investment fields, especially in venture capital.

This led to a mix of good and bad projects.

But if those projects back then had relatively credible institutions participating in funding rounds and had continuously accumulated data for reference like today's OpenAI and SpaceX, I believe the negative effects on investors would have been much smaller.

Recently, two AI projects in traditional fields have been quite eye-catching; one is Cursor, whose parent company is Anysphere; the other is Scale AI.

The former has now become a unicorn in the AI programming field, while the latter was recently invested in by Meta for $14.3 billion.

Cursor's parent company, Anysphere, was established in 2022 and was initially invested in by OpenAI with $11 million in the seed round. I couldn't find its seed round valuation online, but I estimate it to be around $100 million. If that's the case, then OpenAI invested $11 million in a company valued at $100 million.

Scale AI was founded even earlier, in 2016. The earliest investor was Paige Craig, who invested $245,000 in what was then a $3 million valuation of Ava Labs (the predecessor of Scale AI). Later, top Silicon Valley venture capital firms like Accel, YC, and Founders Fund participated in its successive funding rounds.

The reason these companies have been able to grow and develop to this point is partly because they have gone through one venture capital screening after another, and partly because their products have been significantly tested by the market.

As of now, both companies are not publicly traded, and although they have gone through successive rounds of financing since their inception, the investors or institutions that participated can only realize their equity by waiting for subsequent rounds of financing or for the company to go public (IPO).

The liquidity of the assets they hold has a significant discount.

On the other hand, many investors are very eager to participate in such projects, but due to narrow investment channels and information gaps, they simply cannot find such projects.

If such private equity could be tokenized and placed on the blockchain for widespread investor participation, it would not only directly provide liquidity, allowing early participating institutions to exit at any time without waiting for subsequent financing or IPO, but it would also facilitate general investors who are struggling to find investment opportunities but have a strong interest in these projects.

I even believe that if a large number of private equities in traditional fields (such as AI projects) could be tokenized and traded before going public, introduced into the crypto ecosystem, the current phenomenon of blindly chasing meme coins in the crypto ecosystem would quickly disappear—when investors have solid good projects, who would spend all day chasing emotions and treating speculation as investment?

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